Published 8:23 pm, Friday, August 31, 2012

Sgt. Dom Arotzarena works at the Eastmont Police Station. Residents fear a federal takeover will prove costly to them.

Sgt. Dom Arotzarena works at the Eastmont Police Station. Residents fear a federal takeover will prove costly to them.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Some in Oakland fear police receivership

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Nine years of efforts to bring Oakland's Police Department into compliance with a legal settlement from a federal civil rights lawsuit has cost the city millions and embroiled city leaders in a quagmire of legal complications.

The sluggish pace of change on reforms now threatens to put the department into federal receivership, with politicians, a court-appointed monitor, lawyers and city bureaucrats readying for battle over federal control.

But a coalition of Oakland residents worries that federal control would further distance Police Department priorities from residents' needs in the state's most violent city. They say bureaucracy is taking precedence over their safety.

In the court settlement discussions and reports from the monitor who measures compliance, "there's never any discussion there about Oakland's most serious problem, violent crime," said Bruce Nye, board chair for Make Oakland Better Now, a good government group. "All of the focus is on crossing the t's and dotting the i's."

The group is planning to legally intervene in the court settlement, which it hopes will allow group members to push for a mediator to resolve the outstanding issues, avoid federal receivership and offer a counterweight to what they say are overzealous efforts on the part of the monitor.

The reforms are driven by the legal settlement, which was reached after four officers were accused of systematically framing and beating suspects. The reforms require department compliance on 51 tasks, like tight timelines for internal investigations and demographic details on every officer stop.

John Burris, a lawyer for plaintiffs in the original lawsuit, said he was opposed to the residents' efforts.

"I don't see the goal they could play in a constructive way in a law case," he said, adding that his involvement is inherently for the public good.

"We're interested in across-the-board constitutional policing," said Burris. "It's good for the citizens and it's good for the Police Department."

They fear that costs will balloon and taxpayers will bear the brunt if the Police Department is put under outside control.

That's a real possibility, they said, in a city where the Police Department already takes up roughly 40 percent of the budget.

"With the receiver, there's no control," said Paula Hawthorne, a resident who has been closely tracking the monitor's reports. "It's not a democracy."

Hawthorne and others on the coalition emphasized that they don't object to the requirements of the settlement, which they think lead to constitutional policing. However, they believe that the official monitor determining whether the department is in compliance, Robert Warshaw, who the group met with, ignores basic facts.

Oakland has the state's highest violent crime rate. At the same time, the department has, by far, the lowest ratio of officers per violent crime of any comparable city in the state.

Monitor criticized

Members of the citizens' group criticized the monitor for seemingly expecting the department to prioritize documentation over responding to calls - which the department does with a disproportionate number of officers in internal affairs.

"It is not responsible policing to address the settlement agreement in a vacuum," said Geoff Collins, a former member of the city's community policing advisory board.

Warshaw did not respond to requests for comment.

Other coalition members say Warshaw has overstepped his bounds by changing requirements.

The settlement requires data collection on officer stops, they say. It does not mandate determining whether a stop is a good one - which they say the monitor has taken up. They say the settlement says nothing about crowd control, yet Warshaw has made police response to Occupy Oakland a consistent part of his reports.

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